Think soil, not mangoes!
It has been a while that i wanted to write. Something's really got into me. I want to get it out. But, how? Do i really spit out everything that there is inside, just as it is? Or should i take a perspective view of it and then share? After a while of being confused, I decided to start. And just while I did, I got this feeling, where in, what I write here right now, could be useful to me personally more than anything else. That may be the entrepreneur in me talking. Tell me, what is the point in doing things that has no value to offer? This may be totally wrong. But for now, this attitude to life is a little necessary. Time is short, opportunity is huge. I have very consciously replaced 'Dreams' with 'Opportunity' and 'Big' with 'Huge'. You see, dreams are very subjective in nature. Try quantifying your dreams once. It just doesnt seem big enough at the end of it. The harder it is to quantify, the bigger the dreams seem to be. If they are settling on such weak and flexible platforms, i figured it needs a replacement with the right terms. You do what you do best. Add 100% devotion to it and then based on the time and the response from your surroundings, the results starts to show. What more can be done? I dont know.
Well, having put this out for a start, I am still confused as to how to really begin this whole conversation with my imaginary self. I will let this imaginary self that is not, but still me, control my outburst to not get into a meta state and end up spitting out some useless philosophy that dies the fire within me. To be really honest, have never been shrewd enough to pursue anything in my life. This hard perseverance with the farmers is boggling me up totally. It seems to be falling in place. I have no better thing to do apart from this. It is helping me to beautify my visiting card with a print that reads, 'Co-founder'. When I look back, I for most of the time feel, that a lot of time has been wasted. What possibly can I do now? I was lazy back then and lazy now. All the running around has given me a face-lift on my social media profiles, no doubt. Lot of people say they follow me. Quite a few people write to me to understand what I am doing. Its the same farmers that grow food. Its the same people that consume food. What can possibly be done different?
I really dont want to go on bragging about what we do at Directsubzi here. I do that on a daily basis on my social media platforms. Checking in and out of every government run bus I board to every village I visit. But my life right now is caught up in a lot of things. There are a hundred directions that i can think of, and all of which seem to be prominent. Leaving everything else apart for this post, I shall focus only on the one thing that is pushing me constantly for the last three years in its direction. Entrepreneurship I have heard can also be planned for. But some happen as an accident. Mine was the latter. I didnt plan for it. I didnt quit my daily job as a Sales and application engineer to start something. I quit, to learn. I quit, to get exposure. And turns out now, it also helped me have a broad view towards life. Seems like I am aware of quite a few things, but only recently have I started questioning the worth of all the things I may know of. As I said earlier, you see, time is short. And this is where clearly I see a tremendous shift in the way I look at things now.
I boldly call myself an entrepreneur now. The fear of being one is clearly gone. I have been suitably able to convince myself that I am one. From where I come, it is certainly difficult to fallout and start something. How can one start something without capital? Preliminary thoughts. Justified concerns. Unclear answers. Dreams that you just cant quantify. You will have a few friends 'wow-ing' at your WHY's and HOW's. But then, where is this heading right now, I ask myself. From constantly needing approval from some of your close people to leading your idea in accordance to what you believe is the way forward, the journey begins. The idea is itself, no measure for what it takes to execute the idea. I realised this the moment we started thinking growth and scale. Scale scares you. I was thinking to myself, 'What a fool can I be to take upon a problem that is so hard to crack and to reach out to a pool of people that only some of the big players in the industry can'. Mentors suggest scale. Some suggest profitability. We want both. Farmers need solutions. Customers need health and convenience. Team needs work and direction. And most of all, I need to personally settle. To push that for other things to settle first is the toughest part. For me, I have all the time in the world to put things in place. The same me, thinks time is short when I want things to settle for our company. Such conflicting directions in the head. All at the same time. But you know what, my mother said? That to me has entirely changed the way I look at my own life now. She says, 'I completely believe in you and what you are working on. It may take time to settle but you will do it one day, I am sure'. I then ask, what if this fails? She says, 'No problem, you will in your network find a job'. And that to me is the biggest and the strongest safety net that I can ever get, strong enough to support me even from a free-fall from the sky.
We now have a product to showcase. We have paying customers. The company valuation has notably increased. There are quite a few mistakes that we will have to learn from. More importantly we are having that learning curve. There are big players of the same industry that are shutting shop. And others that are only sizing up in power and authority over the market. In this crazy mix of startups and established companies trying to cater to the same set of people; different literature and creative vocabulary takes a lot of space on the stage. That may be the reason why I have been talking a lot about all the things that we do. Whatever said and done, one thing you cannot do without are the tech platforms. Without it you are considered to be another vegetable vendor down the street. Might be a little bit of peer pressure that we also start using the words like Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning when it comes to understanding the data that enterprises like ours gather. It is heavy. It is crazy. Sometimes I wonder, are we capable enough to handle these terms. Three non-tech co-founders set out to capture a market of which the behaviour is already set. If we are not aligned, we will perish. It is as simple as that. And as scary as it sounds to be, death is damn easy. Very much so. The indicators will clearly be of growth, but even without your knowledge you will be digging your own grave. We have realised this. Our team is aware of this.
What is it that I am trying to tell my imaginary self here, I stop and think. You have jumped. Hard and deep. The only way out is to swim and get to the other end. Go survive. That is what I want to tell. But whenever I want to reverse the flow of information, it becomes very convenient for me to shift places. I become the imaginary self. I am telling myself to stop being afraid. There is a lot of pressures that are at play already. The last thing you need is the pressure of being bothered about them all. Lets face it. We are in for the big game. Survival isnt easy but necessary. Survival, but how? And to answer this question, I throw a few fundamental questions to myself. Why am I doing all this? What is the ultimate purpose for me in it? Do i really feel for the farmers that i am working for? Do we need to put sympathy in the forefront of all our intentions behind our actions? I ask myself these questions to really understand that am I built strong enough to handle the scale and growth we are working towards. It should happen in the first place, for sure. But, am I prepared to handle them all. I am damn sure about my co-founders and team acing it. But will I be the bottleneck to our own growth? The fear in us takes different shapes and sizes. As one leaves the body, another tries to take control. My whole life till now has been about overcoming these small fears and still going ahead to do what I wanted to. My heart pumps heavily when I raise my hand up in a conference to ask a question, even to date. How can I possibly even think of managing a set of people and give them a direction. Well, that's my job! And it fears the shit out of me.
Now a team that is growing in size, working in 6 districts across Karnataka we are gearing up for our first stint at growth. Benchmarks and competitor stories blowing our strategies away for good, business terms that has taken over our regular vocabulary, a mind that is filled with nothing but about ways to survive and grow. The next three months will be a dance of chaos, excitement and lot of complexities of all other things that I can be really sure of. There is this itch to grow this bigger and bigger. We know what needs to be done, next three months very clearly. It is not a dream anymore. It is an opportunity that is really huge for our farmers, to our customers and for us. I never knew what we were all signing up for, when we started working on this idea. Our focus now will be only about giving our 100% dedication to the efforts that goes in. It is that point in my life where I have realised that the only way to get mangoes is by understanding and working on soil, manure, water and having a clear knowledge about the seasons. You dont get mangoes by thinking about mangoes. I care for the result, of course. But we are all working without the end line in sight. And for some reason, I am all pumped about it.
Well, having put this out for a start, I am still confused as to how to really begin this whole conversation with my imaginary self. I will let this imaginary self that is not, but still me, control my outburst to not get into a meta state and end up spitting out some useless philosophy that dies the fire within me. To be really honest, have never been shrewd enough to pursue anything in my life. This hard perseverance with the farmers is boggling me up totally. It seems to be falling in place. I have no better thing to do apart from this. It is helping me to beautify my visiting card with a print that reads, 'Co-founder'. When I look back, I for most of the time feel, that a lot of time has been wasted. What possibly can I do now? I was lazy back then and lazy now. All the running around has given me a face-lift on my social media profiles, no doubt. Lot of people say they follow me. Quite a few people write to me to understand what I am doing. Its the same farmers that grow food. Its the same people that consume food. What can possibly be done different?
I really dont want to go on bragging about what we do at Directsubzi here. I do that on a daily basis on my social media platforms. Checking in and out of every government run bus I board to every village I visit. But my life right now is caught up in a lot of things. There are a hundred directions that i can think of, and all of which seem to be prominent. Leaving everything else apart for this post, I shall focus only on the one thing that is pushing me constantly for the last three years in its direction. Entrepreneurship I have heard can also be planned for. But some happen as an accident. Mine was the latter. I didnt plan for it. I didnt quit my daily job as a Sales and application engineer to start something. I quit, to learn. I quit, to get exposure. And turns out now, it also helped me have a broad view towards life. Seems like I am aware of quite a few things, but only recently have I started questioning the worth of all the things I may know of. As I said earlier, you see, time is short. And this is where clearly I see a tremendous shift in the way I look at things now.
I boldly call myself an entrepreneur now. The fear of being one is clearly gone. I have been suitably able to convince myself that I am one. From where I come, it is certainly difficult to fallout and start something. How can one start something without capital? Preliminary thoughts. Justified concerns. Unclear answers. Dreams that you just cant quantify. You will have a few friends 'wow-ing' at your WHY's and HOW's. But then, where is this heading right now, I ask myself. From constantly needing approval from some of your close people to leading your idea in accordance to what you believe is the way forward, the journey begins. The idea is itself, no measure for what it takes to execute the idea. I realised this the moment we started thinking growth and scale. Scale scares you. I was thinking to myself, 'What a fool can I be to take upon a problem that is so hard to crack and to reach out to a pool of people that only some of the big players in the industry can'. Mentors suggest scale. Some suggest profitability. We want both. Farmers need solutions. Customers need health and convenience. Team needs work and direction. And most of all, I need to personally settle. To push that for other things to settle first is the toughest part. For me, I have all the time in the world to put things in place. The same me, thinks time is short when I want things to settle for our company. Such conflicting directions in the head. All at the same time. But you know what, my mother said? That to me has entirely changed the way I look at my own life now. She says, 'I completely believe in you and what you are working on. It may take time to settle but you will do it one day, I am sure'. I then ask, what if this fails? She says, 'No problem, you will in your network find a job'. And that to me is the biggest and the strongest safety net that I can ever get, strong enough to support me even from a free-fall from the sky.
We now have a product to showcase. We have paying customers. The company valuation has notably increased. There are quite a few mistakes that we will have to learn from. More importantly we are having that learning curve. There are big players of the same industry that are shutting shop. And others that are only sizing up in power and authority over the market. In this crazy mix of startups and established companies trying to cater to the same set of people; different literature and creative vocabulary takes a lot of space on the stage. That may be the reason why I have been talking a lot about all the things that we do. Whatever said and done, one thing you cannot do without are the tech platforms. Without it you are considered to be another vegetable vendor down the street. Might be a little bit of peer pressure that we also start using the words like Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning when it comes to understanding the data that enterprises like ours gather. It is heavy. It is crazy. Sometimes I wonder, are we capable enough to handle these terms. Three non-tech co-founders set out to capture a market of which the behaviour is already set. If we are not aligned, we will perish. It is as simple as that. And as scary as it sounds to be, death is damn easy. Very much so. The indicators will clearly be of growth, but even without your knowledge you will be digging your own grave. We have realised this. Our team is aware of this.
What is it that I am trying to tell my imaginary self here, I stop and think. You have jumped. Hard and deep. The only way out is to swim and get to the other end. Go survive. That is what I want to tell. But whenever I want to reverse the flow of information, it becomes very convenient for me to shift places. I become the imaginary self. I am telling myself to stop being afraid. There is a lot of pressures that are at play already. The last thing you need is the pressure of being bothered about them all. Lets face it. We are in for the big game. Survival isnt easy but necessary. Survival, but how? And to answer this question, I throw a few fundamental questions to myself. Why am I doing all this? What is the ultimate purpose for me in it? Do i really feel for the farmers that i am working for? Do we need to put sympathy in the forefront of all our intentions behind our actions? I ask myself these questions to really understand that am I built strong enough to handle the scale and growth we are working towards. It should happen in the first place, for sure. But, am I prepared to handle them all. I am damn sure about my co-founders and team acing it. But will I be the bottleneck to our own growth? The fear in us takes different shapes and sizes. As one leaves the body, another tries to take control. My whole life till now has been about overcoming these small fears and still going ahead to do what I wanted to. My heart pumps heavily when I raise my hand up in a conference to ask a question, even to date. How can I possibly even think of managing a set of people and give them a direction. Well, that's my job! And it fears the shit out of me.
Now a team that is growing in size, working in 6 districts across Karnataka we are gearing up for our first stint at growth. Benchmarks and competitor stories blowing our strategies away for good, business terms that has taken over our regular vocabulary, a mind that is filled with nothing but about ways to survive and grow. The next three months will be a dance of chaos, excitement and lot of complexities of all other things that I can be really sure of. There is this itch to grow this bigger and bigger. We know what needs to be done, next three months very clearly. It is not a dream anymore. It is an opportunity that is really huge for our farmers, to our customers and for us. I never knew what we were all signing up for, when we started working on this idea. Our focus now will be only about giving our 100% dedication to the efforts that goes in. It is that point in my life where I have realised that the only way to get mangoes is by understanding and working on soil, manure, water and having a clear knowledge about the seasons. You dont get mangoes by thinking about mangoes. I care for the result, of course. But we are all working without the end line in sight. And for some reason, I am all pumped about it.
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